On balance I thought this was a pretty productive, good debate for the simple reason that a series of central debates in the Democratic party and this campaign were joined clearly, in a generally well argued and illuminating way. Former Rep. John Delaney was clearly the odd man out on the stage (possibly with Gov. Bullock a runner up). He frequently seemed like he was in a time warp back to the 1990s. But he provided an effective foil to Warren and Sanders; he even leveled some reasonable critiques. In so doing he managed to garner wildly more time on air than his non-candidacy possibly merits. But I thought it was good because you had a series of set piece exchanges which really captured the broader debate in a clear and illuminating way.
10:12 PM: Another classic Warren moment, rubbing her hands in lo-fi glee over her wealth tax applied to Delaney’s fortune …
The Warren wealth tax hand rub!!!!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/2YF54JwPEv
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 31, 2019
9:38 PM: The Green New Deal spends about half or likely more than half its money on things unrelated to the environment.
9:22 PM: A memorable moment …
Elizabeth's moment pic.twitter.com/Wkj63iaOAB
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 31, 2019
9:10 PM: This debate was going pretty well and then it all went wrong.
8:50 PM: A simple point. The entire immigration debate – at least in this debate – has been reduced to this issue of whether unauthorized border crossing should be a civil offense or a criminal offense. It’s not a non-issue. But quite apart from the rights and wrongs this is an incredibly narrow issue in the broader immigration debate. As the advocates of decriminalization make fairly clear the reason they want to do this is that President Trump has used this law as the hook for family separations. By and large previous administrations chose to deal with crossings as civil infractions. In other words, before President Trump, in practice it wasn’t criminalized in the first place (there were exceptions). So in practice there’s very little difference. This amounts to an argument that if we get a Democratic president, it will be a priority to formally change border crossings to only a civil offense so that a future Trump-like President wouldn’t be able to use the law for family separations in the future. Of course, presumably a future Trump-like President could simply change the law again. Again, not that it’s a non-issue. But this is a narrow and technical issue that would largely be moot under a Democratic President in the first place.
8:37 PM: So far I think this is a really good debate because most or all of the candidates are making the best, clearest arguments for their case.
8:34 PM: I mentioned this in an earlier post. I think this debate about taxes and premiums is wrong. I think in practice employers will pocket much of the savings (from no longer paying premiums) and individuals will pay real and substantial new taxes.
8:27 PM: Pitting Sanders and Delaney against each other here is actually very edifying. It gets the core issues on both sides right out there.
8:23 PM: Decent openings from Buttigieg and O’Rourke.
8:20 PM: Interesting that with Sanders and Warren on the stage as the frontrunners, the also-rans can position themselves as non-ideologues as though Biden and Harris weren’t in the race.
8:18 PM: Delaney’s such a fascinating, weird player in this campaign. It’s like he’s running for President of the 1990s. It’s not whether these ideas are good or not. They’re just so distant from where the Democratic party is today.
8:12 PM: Remarkable. CNN is reporting that Sanders may go after Warren on the issue of electability. It’s hard for me to see how that’s a good angle for him, though I will say that Sanders consistently polls a bit better than Warren in head to head match ups with President Trump.
I’d never heard of her before. She’s a business partner of Art Laffer and Stephen Moore and for the last couple decades she’s been an under-the-radar social safety grim reaper hired by one GOP governor after another to tack state budgets hard to the right and cut spending on basically everything while blocking any next taxes. Illinois, Florida, California, New York and now Alaska amidst other states. Meet Donna Arduin.
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Sen. Kamala Harris has a revised Medicare for All plan out today. (She describes it in this Medium post.) Depending on your perspective it either tries to split the difference or come up with a creative compromise between the candidates with various “build on Obamacare/public option” type plans and those embracing Medicare for All. Stepping back we can see that this dance – which Harris struggled most to find a position on – stems from the fact that first in 2017 and then again in 2019 most of the top tier presidential candidates were bamboozled into adopting a plan which they were told was widely popular but which in fact clear majorities of the population oppose – and perhaps oppose quite intensely.
According to Axios and The New York Times, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats will be stepping down shortly and he’s likely to be replaced by Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), one of the most aggressive GOP questioners at the Mueller hearing. In advance of last week’s hearings, news reports suggested that Ratcliffe was under consideration for the position. He’s an arch conservative, diehard Trump loyalist and critic of the Mueller probe. He would oversee that entire US Intelligence community. You can see a portion of Ratcliffe’s Q&A with Mueller below.
Chris Wallace stands out like a sore thumb at Fox News simply because he’s a journalist. But he frequently exceeds that lowish bar. Watch this exchange with acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney about the attacks on Rep. Cummings.
"I'm not reading between the lines, I'm reading the lines." pic.twitter.com/mVXsuxw9HO
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 28, 2019